Effects of the Recommendation Label Prominence on Online Hotel Booking Intention: An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

Online travel agencies (OTAs) rely on marketing clues to reduce the consumer uncertainty perceptions of online travel-related products. The recommendation label served as the information provided by the official platform has a profound effect on consumers’ purchase decisions. The purpose of this article is to explore the impact of the recommendation label prominence (RLP) on consumer visual attention and booking intention, and investigate the moderating effect of online comment valence (OCV). Eye movement is closely related to the transfer of visual attention, so it is employed to record consumers’ visual attention. This research uses a 3 (recommendation label prominence: without vs. low vs. high) 3 (online comment valence: low vs. medium vs. high) design to conduct the experiments. The main findings showed the following:(1) The recommendation label can significantly improve the visual attention to the entire OTA advertisements(ads) and inspire the purchase intention;(2) Online comment valence moderates the effect of the recommendation label prominence on both visual attention to the entire OTA advertisements and purchase intention. Only when the online comment valence is medium, high recommendation label prominence can significantly increase the attention to the entire OTA advertisements; and when the online comment valence are medium and high, the recommendation label can significantly raise consumers’ purchase intention. The results suggest that OTAs can enhance the advertising effectiveness by adding the official recommendation label and increasing the label’s prominence. Still, when the online comment valence of the hotel is low, the official recommendation label cannot “save” it.